The debate seems to go like this:
Pro: I don’t care whether you think it is right prisoners have human rights or not, the European Court of Human Rights has decreed that they do and that voting is one of them and so prisoners must be allowed to vote.
Con: As far as I’m concerned, prisoners forfeit their human rights when they commit a crime and so I don’t care what is said in Europe, they shouldn’t have the vote.
We have an impasse; the debate has devolved into “yes they should, no they shouldn’t”.
What no one seems to have noticed, however, is that we aren’t actually debating whether prisoners should have the vote anymore; we are debating whether we should abide by the laws of the European Court of Human Rights. Oh Bugger.
The difficulty is that, however distasteful I may find the majority view, we are a democracy and what the majority says goes. The majority says we should ignore the ECHR in this case and so we should.
Except.
The ECHR exists to provide members of a state who are being run-over roughshod by their government the opportunity to stand up to those in power. If we start picking and choosing which judgments we abide by, the entire process becomes meaningless. If we choose to ignore the ECHR now, when it suits us, then when we need them to stop our government doing something a lot worse, the government will just be able to turn round and say “no”.
I honestly care very little* about whether prisoners get the vote or not, but I DO care a very great deal about human rights and the protection ECHR gives us from abuses by our own government. We may not like that they have given prisoners the vote, but the ruling is based on sound litigation and several centuries of laws surrounding prisoners, their rights and the purpose of imprisonment. We ignore this ruling at our own peril.
* I care little, but I do care and I happen to think they should. However, I believe very strongly that that view is largely irrelevant in the face of the much more important one I am expressing here.
Why deny prisoners a right to vote? Do people think the prisoners can somehow vote in some Evil Dood who will destroy their lives? Prisoners will only have the same choice of corporate-sponsored shmucks that everyone else gets.
I dunno. I think most people have some strange idea that prison is populated almost entirely by serial killers and paedophiles and they just can’t bear the thought of such evil people having any rights at all.
It’s not really surprising as that is what the press would have us believe.
It gets me down when I think about it so I try not to very often!